


balance

by kiden



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-21 00:51:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15545964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiden/pseuds/kiden
Summary: Silly little pre-slash ficlet in which John can't sleep and Rodney is his emotional baggage.(repost)





	balance

It’s been a week and John still feels off-balance. The stars are always wrong, which is a stupid thing to think, really, because they were always wrong in Pegasus too. Every planet has a different sky, different far-off stars, but John had always liked the idea of one that could guide you home by ship or foot. Pull you across a sea or down a road until your bones settled, your movements only muscle memory dragging you up a front porch or a flight of stairs and through a door to a place that could make you sigh, everything familiar.

The way John feels off-balance is like carrying a fifty pound pack up the side of a mountain. All the gear, the weapons, and provisions. Hauling all that weight until you forget it’s there. And then, once you let it all drop, you teeter uncomfortably, missing the baggage you stopped noticing miles ago.

Years ago.

In the dark, in the glow of his digital alarm clock and the small out of moonlight coming in through the blinds, John laughs to himself. Can imagine Rodney’s face at being called baggage, and maybe John would mention it the next time they see each other, but then he’d have to explain how the thought came about and he’s just not ready for that yet. Maybe, probably, he’ll never be.

But his shoulders still feel lighter than they should. It’s a compliment, really. He wonders if Rodney would see it that way.

Rodney with his threadbare superhero shirts, his striped button-ups and pockets full of change that rattles unfamiliar in John’s ears. He focuses on the sound of it, as small as it is, as inconsequential, because it’s just loose change and it shouldn’t matter. But just like the t-shirts, like the way he texts Jeannie over dinner, the way he catches the tune of something in an elevator and starts to sing along - it’s all so incredibly earth that John doesn’t know what to do with it. It all adds up to John having to accept Rodney in this new light, something much more reachable, no uniforms or ranks or consequences to keep the distance between them impossible to close.

If he’d just slide his hand across the table and take Rodney’s in his own, would it really be such a risk? Here, when they are usually hundreds of miles apart, knowing that when it matters Rodney could keep a secret with the best of them.

Pegasus, Atlantis, all of it was unfathomable and romantic, in the way that a few miles of sprawling city can always be, the way far-off lights can shine on a face and tilt your world just so until you’re breathless. But earth is solid, tangible in a different way, like the breadth of Rodney’s shoulders and how John knows his skin would be warm, always, even in the cold.

John’s baggage. Missed opportunities to say something honest, to leap without looking, trusting that even if Rodney couldn’t catch him he’d at least break his fall. And God, it’s more than opportunities that John misses. It’s everything: the curve of Rodney’s mouth, that John could predict with equations just from memory, the rise of his voice and the snap of his fingers when he’s brilliant, how he’s always brilliant, and his eyes like open windows over the top of a computer screen. A promise there, maybe, hidden behind layers of fear and insecurity. The kind that twist now, and always, around John’s chest, wrapping out around his limbs to keep himself from mapping the freckles across Rodney’s face and neck.

There’s no one John has to report to, no actions he has to justify, not now, not in the dark in his apartment, where Rodney isn’t his colleague anymore but his friend. Where the only way that John needs Rodney to save him has nothing to do with impending doom, doesn’t count on how fast his fingers can fly over a keyboard or dig into the guts of a ‘jumper, but how slow they can trace the curve of John’s spine.

To leap without looking. To jump, knowing that Rodney will catch him, or at the very least, break his fall. That he just has to take the first step, and well, John has always been good at taking risks.

His cell phone glows too bright in the dark of his bedroom, and John squints against the light of it, types with two steady thumbs,  _I miss you Rodney_ , then backspaces it away.

Types instead, _I can’t sleep._

It’s only a minute before Rodney answers,  _Neither can I_. He says,  _Tell me how much you hate your new team._

And John thinks, I’ll do you one better, McKay.

He says,  _So much that I’m actually missing you._


End file.
